


Because Bobbi said no

by TotallyARealPerson



Series: Phineas and Ferb fics [1]
Category: Phineas and Ferb
Genre: Angst, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Multi, Professional Burnout, Stabbing, Stalking, bad managers, working through injury because your boss is a fucking jerk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:28:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24082852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TotallyARealPerson/pseuds/TotallyARealPerson
Summary: In which Bobbi says no to rejoining Love Handel.
Relationships: Bobbi Fabulous & Danny & Sherman | Swampy (Phineas & Ferb), Bobbi Fabulous/Danny/Sherman | Swampy
Series: Phineas and Ferb fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1771129
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Because Bobbi said no

**Author's Note:**

> TW: (emotional, physical, psychological) abuse (mentioned), invasion of privacy/stalking (mentioned), violence (stabbing) (explicit), homophobia (mentioned), burnout (explicit), bad managers (he never shows up), working through injury because your boss is a fucking jerk (not explicit). Please tune away if you're triggered by these things. Be safe, don't get triggered.

Danny moaned, rubbing his shoulder where the friction of his guitar strap against the purple polyester shirt had started to leave a rash. He lay the instrument down carefully in its case and flopped on the couch. It was a lovely night, with clear skies, and near to no wind. It wasn't that cold out either, so Swampy didn't get all that cold like he often complained about.

Bobbi was more careful, and actually took off his yellow leather coat and boots before turning to the comfy couch.

Bobbi lifted Danny by the shoulder, only to sit where his head had been lying and flop down, himself. Danny was unfazed and simply lay his head across Bobbi's lap. Bobbi instinctively snatched the hair tie out of Danny's hair and started combing through his hair with his fingers. It was greasy, as it often was. Danny didn't wash his hair as often as he should, to practice more on his guitar and daydream about chocolate rain. 

He did that more with hygiene than he probably should, but he bolted out songs like it was nobody's business, so their manager tended not to care. (It was only when the songwriting stopped for five minutes that he got angry.)

(He tended not to care that it usually took Swampy hiding his guitar and Bobbi shoving him into a hotel's bathroom for a nice, long shower, or that he usually composed in there anyways. Bobbi couldn't count the number of times Danny collapsed from exhaustion, buck-naked in the bathroom after a shower, in nothing but a towel, and Swampy or Bobbi found near-complete musical stanzas on the mirror's fog. Or that either or both of them woke up in the middle of the night on the road to find Danny composing by the faint lights of his lava lamp.)

The gentle, repetitive motions on Danny's head, around his ears, and scratching against his scalp, were so nice that the younger nearly fell asleep. All the excitement usually drained him less than this, he didn't know what was going on. Though it may be the pain meds he was taking for the sprained ankle he got running from mobs of crazies, and their manager wouldn't let him sit down on stage because that was 'boring'.

"Hey, Bobbi?" Danny's faint, sleepy voice called.

"Yes, Danny?" Bobbi answered, picking apart Danny's tangles as gently as he could.

"Where's Swampy?" he asked.

"I don't know," Bobbi said faintly. "Probably putting away the drum set in the van or scrounging around the garbage cans again, or something."

The twenty-something-year-old snorted and turned to dig his nose in Bobbi's stomach. "He does that sometimes."

"I never know why, when we have perfectly good food here," Bobbi said softly, momentarily pausing to contemplate.

Danny whined low in his throat, and Bobbi started petting his bandmate's hair again.

There was a long pause, before the screaming from outside the dressing room flared, with a distinctive edge of 'HE'S EATING OUT OF THE TRASH! TAKE MY MONEY!'. Bobbi sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose and scratching behind Danny's ear with the other. Danny was sleeping now. He was a snorer, but had thankfully learned to quiet himself once he became a rock star. If he was heard outside the dressing room, they usually came with scissors for his ponytail. Or something equally disturbing.

… Yeah, they'd slept in shifts since that incident. Danny had been too scared to go to sleep alone for a while after the visit with the police. Bobbi still sometimes woke up with Danny curled under his comforter, hiding himself under the covers all the way up to his silky-smooth locks.

Bobbi relaxed against the couch, rested his hand in the crook of Danny's neck, and sighed tiredly. He'd have left the music a long time ago if it hadn't been for Danny and Swampy. And sometimes, he still didn't know why he - or they, for that matter - stayed in. Danny's been assaulted multiple times, to the point where he was sometimes scared to be alone with fans. Swampy was falling back into his childhood habits of dumpster-diving, since his family didn't always have enough money to live. And Bobbi was tired all the time, and seriously contemplating violating the contract and getting a therapist.

Being an entertainer was mentally and physically exhausting. And he knew Danny and Swampy felt it, too. Swampy cried in the middle of the nights sometimes, cuddled into Danny while Bobbi made casserole or french-braided his hair, and Danny's sleepy lyrics on the bathroom mirrors sometimes betrayed a feeling of melancholy, such that it hurt to read on bad days.

This wasn't entertaining to _them_. It was a lot of endless nights composing, invasion of privacy, jeopardizing of relationships, messed-up circadian rhythms, missed: anniversaries, birthdays, dates, work, appointments... The list went on and on.

Danny snuffled. Bobbi moved his hand, and little brown locks fell between his cold fingers. He frowned at the cherry-red digits - he really needed some good gloves when he was on-stage. Bobbi leaned back further with a lengthy sigh, and started running his fingers through Danny's hair again.

The yelling got closer, and Danny whined, turning his nose further into Bobby's gut, and careful not to jostle his ankle. The door opened and closed rapidly, admitting a panting Swampy, with holes in his clothing and a missing hair tie. He relaxed against the door and relaxed his heels with a sigh. "Man, those guys are insane," Swampy groaned.

"Danny's sleeping," Bobbi said lowly. "Are your things in the van?"

"Yup, just finished," Swampy said. "The other guys've got the speaker's n' stuff."

"Danny's guitar is right there," Bobbi pointed to the closed case, "and mine's on the table. Lemme just get my coat and boots..."

Bobbi managed to get his coat and boots on again, and then picked up Danny. Swampy was fine with carrying their instruments as long as Danny got sleep. He didn't get enough sleep, ever.

They got outside, and their tour bus was surrounded by rabid fans, pushing on the bus and yelling. Bobbi got out a pair of headphones from his coat and slipped them on Danny's head over his ears, and their security team thankfully kept the mob away from them. Swampy had enough of the hair-pulling and scratching and biting for one day.

Bobbi tucked Danny into his bunk while Swampy put their instruments under the fold-up couch, and then Bobbi climbed onto his own bunk, just above Danny's and below Swampy's.

Just as Swampy turned off the light in the RV, and Bobbi relaxed as the bus drove away and the shaking stopped, he left his mind open with the possibilities.

He'd always dreamed of going to beauty school, and opening a salon of his own. The band was only meant to be a part-time gig thing, to finance his business licence and go to school, and maybe buy the property. When had Love Handel turned into such a fad? Because time flew him by. There was a time when he'd broken his arm in the middle of their last tour, and that leg of the tour was completely and totally fuzzy. He wasn't even sure he had been playing instruments at all, but he was certain his arm had healed wrong as a result of it.

He finally heard Swampy's snoring, and whispered something none of them wanted to hear, or even think. "I think the band should split up. I think we should disregard the contract. I want to sleep. I want to..." The gut-punching truth caught in his throat and he turned on his side, listening to the purring engine of their tour RV.

The snoring above and below him went uninterrupted.

Bobbi curled up in the inadequate warmth of his blanket and tried to sleep.

_I want to kill that quack who calls himself our manager. He doesn't deserve us. He doesn't care about us as people. We should move to France, where they've never heard of us. Sherman knows French, after all. We all have good passports, we could make it. We can change our names, Sherman can work in a library like he's always wanted to. I can be a coiffeur like I've always wanted to. Danny, you can keep working with music, because I get the feeling you'd explode without it. I just love both of you so much, and when I get out, I don't want you stuck here alone..._

His blanket covered his head, hooded around to shield his ears and squish his hairspray-covered hair.

He needed a fucking break.

~?~

He'd thrown the comb like it was a shuriken, and wasn't quite sure where on the old, old, old poster it landed. But he had seen the relic bolted to the wall, and the two children it accompanied looking somewhat worried - possibly for their lives. Bobbi was certainly feeling murderous. He was a coiffeur and a business manager, he didn't need people reminding him of that band.

Gasps rang around his ears as he came out from behind the curtain and walked towards his front desk manager. He'd made a point of knowing all of his customers, employees, and associates by name. A remnant of when Love Handel was still operating and it was dangerous to not keep track of names. "Fabiana, who are these little people?" He pulled a magnifying glass out of exactly nowhere. Things like that just sort of happened. Like the giant floating baby head he was pretty sure came from another dimension.

"I don't know, sir," Fabiana said.

"You're a mess," he directed to the boy with red hair and a white-and-orange striped shirt. The magnifying glass disappeared again. "And you," he said to the boy with a knight's helmet, "Feudal Europe is so last month."

"We're trying to get Love Handel back together!" the Mess said.

His heart leapt into his throat. All the memories came rushing back with the force of a bullet train. He quickly recoiled. "I'm not interested," said Bobbi firmly.

"Just for one night?" he asked again. "It's our parents' wedding anniversary, and-"

"The whole environment was toxic," Bobbi interrupted. "And no, I won't elaborate on that. You might convince the others, but I can still remember everything bad, and it frankly wasn't worth the fame and fortune. I'm not going back, and you can't make me."

There were phantoms of blood pooling through his fingers as Swampy's breathing became ragged, and Bobbi tried holding off the familiar symptoms of shock. He'd left the knife in, and kept away Swampy's hands as he tried to extract it. It was a dumpster behind a fast-food place, where Swampy had been dumpster-diving again. Bobbi halted the objections, keeping his weak, shaking hands away from the stab wound, and tried in vain to calm his best friend as Danny ran to the nearest public phone with a few quarters for an ambulance.

He still had nightmares of Danny waking in the middle of the night screaming his lungs out, and hiding under his covers crying if Bobbi or Swampy tried to help without turning on the lights first. He'd seriously needed therapy, and it was cruel to keep him from it as their tour bus continued and their manager brought up their contract five times a week, the only thing keeping them all from quitting at that point. Their lead singer flinched at touch for years and became addicted to painkillers, and snapped at Swampy when he tried to make Danny detox and again when Bobbi took him to therapy.

Bobbi still had nightmares about Lillian, their makeup artist who'd once drugged and tied up the trio, threatened them with a gun, and demanded a part in their band, and more money. Swampy had good access to their knots, and managed to untie Danny and Bobbi, who managed to take down Lillian and untie Swampy respectively.

Their manager was an utterly callous monster, with no regard towards he and his bandmates as people, only as cash cows and what they could do. They were also incredibly hard on Danny when the youngest couldn't come up with songs fast enough, like writer's block wasn't a thing. Prodigies or no, they weren't machines. It often sent Danny into anxiety attacks, and Sherman to puke in the toilet (though, it was equally possible that was food poisoning).

Bobbi had emotionally and physically abusive parents, because he was gay. Love Handel was a wonderful way to get out of that previous toxic environment, but it was really just escaping one for another. (At least this one didn't involve conversion ~~torture~~ therapy. That didn't mean he didn't end up hating every aspect of his life.) He flinched when people threw fists at him, and hid behind the boots in his closet when people yelled. And he couldn't get therapy for it. Concerts were exhausting, not only for standing on his feet for hours and recalling vague song lyrics while also playing an instrument that wasn't always his worn-out, perfect bass.

Aside from Danny and Swampy, he hated the industry. All of it.

"But just one night?" the Mess asked.

"I've got plans," Bobbi said. "So no. I'm not coming back on your Love Handel reunion night."

After so many years of working to have a relationship who didn't care about either of his status platforms, either from Love Handel or his beauty salon, or one that didn't care he'd genuinely abandoned music, he'd never found one. But it was his niece's birthday, and he'd promised to play their organ for the Phantom of the Opera song she so loved.

He was busy. He couldn't go, even if he wanted to. Which he didn't. Danny and Swampy were nice, and sometimes after meeting 'let me speak to your manager' entitled bitches he missed his music and his bandmates, where he could lean against people who supported him and who he supported without judgement because they all had the same baggage. But he was happy where he was, with his job, with his life. He didn't want to leave. He didn't need to leave. And neither of the other two had wanted to get back together anyways, Bobbi didn't see why he should want to either.

Sometimes he did. There were days when he spent all his lunch hour staring longingly at his blue and purple bass, and wondering how different life would have been if he'd pulled the two close and made sure they stuck together. But Bobbi was barely surviving in that band, watching his friends fall apart around his ears. Danny was being pulled apart by everyone, and wouldn't trust anyone except for Bobbi and Swampy. Swampy wasn't happy where he was, more content to read in silence than go out on stage and perform. They'd be hard-pressed to drag their drummer away from his library.

Frankly, everything was a bit fuzzy after that. He decided to take a break and cancel his appointments to catch up on his paperwork, leaving Fabiana in charge of the front, and redistributing his appointments between his co-workers. He would take some extra work for them tomorrow, when his head was back on straight.

Maybe he'd missed an opportunity.

He was all out of a capacity to care, if he'd ever even had one.

His niece needed an organ player.


End file.
